The new Board Chairman of the Ghana Cocoa Board (Cocobod), Hackman Owusu-Agyeman, has argued that the planned cut in “outrageous” salaries of Cocobod’s top management is to ensure that the Board does not go beyond the state remuneration structure.

According to him, in spite of plans to slash salaries, some top managers of Cocobod will still earn more than the president and other Article 71 office holders which are pegged around GHC22,000.

“Cocobod is a state institution. It cannot be taken out of the context of the overall remuneration structure and within the executive and those ancillary services.

“For me, it is absolutely unthinkable that the gross salary of the Chief Executive Officer should be in the neighbourhood of GHC70,000 to GHC75,000 a month, and the net is about GHC55, 000 to GHC57,000 a month. If you even discount this by 50 percent, it would still be higher than anybody under article 71 of the constitution.

“At the end of the day, we have to be able to say that the work that is being done is getting reasonable levels of remuneration commensurate with the work that they do, and also within the context of the Ghanaian economy,” he told Accra-based Citi FM.

He believed that if Cocobod were making profits, “it would have been a different story, but in the last three to five years, there has been deficit upon deficit. If you are making no profit and we begin to say we want to discipline and trim down expense and what have you, then you have to look at the whole thing.”

Mr. Owusu-Agyeman was further worried that several cocoa farmers have become poor while officials who are supervising their activities have rather benefited immensely.

“I saw one of the budgets where the amount of money allocated to cocoa farmers’ children amounted to basically GHC2 million and that is easily the total gross salary of the two or three persons at the top. All I am saying is those who do the work should benefit more than anybody else,” he said.

Mr. Owusu-Agyeman was sworn in as Chairman of the Board, together with other board members on Tuesday, March 28, 2017.

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